For those of you who aren't aware, technically, Salsa dancing originated as Mambo danced to Salsa music. Many folks today refer to Mambo as "dancing on '2'". But, in reality, Salsa is actually Mambo "danced on '1'".
This is an interesting historical take on the orgigins of Mambo, reproduced from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/news/Winter95.txt [1]
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Cachao, Mambo, and Descarga: A Latin Music Legend
By Morton Marks
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On September 15, 1994, Cachao and his orchestra played a special
concert at the Library of Congress in celebration of Hispanic
Heritage Month. The event was cosponsored by the American Folklife
Center and the Hispanic Division, in partnership with Crescent
Moon/Epic Records. Morton Marks prepared the following notes for
the program.
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Israel Lopez, el Gran Cachao, has played a pioneering role in the
development of Cuban music for almost sixty years. He was born into
a musical family in Havana in 1918. His older brother and sister
were already musicians, and thirty-five of Cachao's relatives
played the bass, which became his instrument of choice. A prolific
composer, arranger, and instrumentalist, Cachao is a virtuoso
bassist who developed the percussive and harmonic role of this
instrument in Cuban dance music. By the time he was nineteen,
Cachao and his brother Orestes had invented the mambo, which was
first played over a Cuban radio station in 1938. The mambo gave
rise to a new way of structuring Cuban dance music, and its effects
have been felt inside and outside of Cuba down to the present.
Most North Americans probably associate mambo with the big
bands of the 1940s and 1950s, led by Machito, Tito Puente, and
others in New York, and by Damaso Perez Prado in Mexico City. These
represent the merging of Afro-Cuban song style and rhythmic
approaches with the riffs, instrumentation, and voicings of North
American swing bands.
But the mambo in Cuba has very different origins. It emerged
from the charanga orchestras of flute, strings, piano, and
percussion that appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century,
and from the danzon, a late-nineteenth-century Cuban dance with
roots in the courts and salons of eighteenth-century Europe. The
gradual transformation of the contredanse into the Afro-Cuban mambo
is a perfect illustration of the process of creolization or
Cubanization, the intermingling of European and African musical
approaches that accounts for the tremendous appeal of Cuban music
all over the world.
French dances such as the minuet and contredanse (which had
entered France as the English country-dance) were familiar to the
Havana elite in the late eighteenth century. They came again to
Cuba, this time to the eastern cities of Guantanamo and Santiago,
with the French colonists who were fleeing the Haitian revolution
of 1791. The contredanse became the Cuban contradanza, then the
danza or habanera, and then the danzon. As it became Cubanized, it
changed in several ways: in its original form a collective line or
figure dance, often led by a bastonero or dance master, it evolved
into a couple dance.
Rhythmically, it was affected by Afro-Caribbean features such
as the cinquillo, also known as the habanera or tango rhythm.
Structurally, it evolved into a rondo form, a multi-strained dance
with contrasting themes and instrumentation. The final section
often showed more Afro-Cuban influences. By 1910, in Jose Urfe's
composition "El Bombin de Barreto," the danzon ended with
instrumental solos over a montuno, or repeated refrain, borrowed
from the Cuban son. This movement toward a more Afro-Cuban style is
characteristic of many kinds of Cuban music, and the multi-part
danzon lent itself perfectly to this transitional feature.
In 1937, Orestes and Cachao Lopez were playing cello and bass
for flautist Antonio Arca¤o and his charanga band Las Maravillas,
and were also responsible for arranging and composing a good part
of the band's repertoire. Once, when Arca¤o's songbook was stolen,
the Lopez brothers had to come up with a new one quickly, and they
composed almost thirty danzones a week. Between the two of them,
Cachao estimates that they composed a total of three thousand
danzones.
By the late 1930s, the Afro-Cubanizing of the danzon and the
charanga orchestra that played it was completed. The mambo seems to
have originated as a series of syncopated guajeos (or riffs) on
Cachao's bass, which became the basis for the third or montuno
section of a traditional danzon. This part was first called danzon
de nuevo ritmo, and later danzon mambo. In 1938 Orestes Lopez
composed a tune called "Mambo." In later recordings, it would go
directly from a brief introduction to the final section, what
Arca¤o called "la sabrosura" or the "funky" part, doing away
entirely with the middle section and the repeats.
By 1939, with the addition of a conga drum to the charanga
ensemble, the Afro-Cuban structure of the mambo had solidified. The
conga was borrowed from the conjunto ensemble (brass, tres, and
percussion) led by Arsenio Rodriguez, who had created the modern
Afro-Cuban sound for the conjunto by layering ostinato patterns and
building elaborate arrangements around the clave, the backbone of
Cuban dance music. Arcano and the Lopez brothers transformed the
charanga orchestra in a similar way.
In the final mambo section, Cachao's bass interlocks with the
conga's tumbao or ostinato as anchor, over which the violins played
their repeated guajeos. On top were the floreos or improvisations
of Arcano's flute. Another innovation was the cowbell added to the
timbales set, now a standard feature in Latin music. By the early
forties, the flowing rhythm and syncopations of the new sound were
a tremendous hit with dancers. The Arcano band had energized the
charanga sound and reunited the danzon with the dancing public.
In I957 Cachao rounded up the best musicians from the Havana
clubs and produced a series of after-hours recordings that have
become textbooks for Latin musicians. These are the descargas, or
Cuban jam sessions, that opened up the highly structured format of
Cuban music to solos and improvisation. They featured legendary
musicians like Tata Gines on conga, Barretico on timbales, and
Richard Eges on flute. Because the musicians played in different
kinds of orchestras (conjunto, charanga, jazz band), the descargas
often featured novel instrumental combinations and pointed the way
to later developments in Latin music.
Cachao left Cuba in 1962 and soon established himself as an
important figure on the New York salsa scene. In 1966, he was a
guest of honor at a series of all-star descargas held at New York's
Village Gate, where he was featured in an electrifying "jam" with
bass solos. These sessions came at the dawn of Latin New York's
salsa explosion, largely based on Cuban musical forms. It is only
fitting that Cachao should have been present at the launching in
another milieu of the music he had done so much to create and that
is now reaching a much wider audience.
Long thought of as a "musician's musician" and revered by
Latin music fans, in the last two years Cachao has become known to
a much larger audience, and he has finally begun to receive wide
public acceptance and acclaim. Actor Andy Garcia has played an
important role in this breakthrough, hosting a memorable concert
("Cachao, Mambo & Descarga") in Miami in 1992. He also produced the
feature-length documentary/concert film, Cachao: Como su Ritmo No
Hay Dos (Cachao: Like His Rhythm There Is No Other) released on
Epic Home Video. Garcia was also involved in the production of
Master Sessions Volume 1, the first of a series of CDs on Crescent
Moon/Epic Records.
Bibliography
Galan, Natalio. Cuba y sus Sones. Valencia, Spain: Pre-
textos/Musica, 1983.
Gerard, Charley, with Marty Sheller. Salsa!: The Rhythm of Latin
Music. Crown Point, Indiana: White Cliffs Media Co., 1989.
Leon, Argeliers. Del Canto y el Tiempo. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial
Letras Cubanas, 1984.
Salazar, Max. "El Gran Cachao," in Latin Beat Magazine, vol. 1, no.
4 (April 1991).
Santos, John. Notes to The Cuban Danzon, Its Ancestors and
Descendants. Smithsonian Folkways.
Szwed, John, and Morton Marks. "The Afro-American Transformation of
European Set Dances and Dance Suites." In Dance Research Journal
(summer 1988).
Tamargo, Luis. "Cachao: Like His Rhythm There Is Not Other." Latin
Beat Magazine, vol. 3, no. 10 (December/January 1994).
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Morton Marks is an ethnomusicologist who lives in Brooklyn, New
York. He holds a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of
California, Berkeley. Dr. Marks has produced two collections of
Cuban music for Rounder Records and is working on a project called
"Latin New York," also for Rounder.
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Captions
Israel "Cachao" Lopez on the Neptune Plaza for a concert at the
Library of Congress, September 15, 1994. Photo by James Hardin
Nelson Gonzales, on tres. Photo by James Hardin
Jimmy Bosch, on trombone. Photo by James Hardin